I'm John Thatcher with Sean Kingsley and Rex Callan, the author of the new book, The Pirate King,

The Strange Adventures of Henry Avery and the Birth of the Golden Age of Piracy.

Avery's gone. He's disappeared. It's now 1696 in an inn called the World's End. And in that in, at that day,

is a man contemplating his own fate. His name is foe, but he takes on the name DeFoe because it

sounds more princely. He's always in trouble. He's always in debt. He's always come up with new schemes.

He was born well and he lost it in a big gamble of sailing from one side of the world to the other.

And he needs a way out. And the way out, of course, is that he's made friends with the reigning monarch,

King William, who came over in the glorious revolution.

Rex, come to you at this moment because you meet foe, you introduce foe who becomes

defoe, and you're a measure of him as a, not just as a novelist, we know him as Robinson Crow, as a merchantman.

Is this representative of the time you gambled and you won bigger, you lost?

Thanks, Rex.

Well, yes.

I mean, he was, he was the subject of discussions.

He was the, he was part of the swashbuckling life that was, that characterise his type.

He was a source of extremely interesting and exciting stories.

He was really an important character who fleshed himself out with his exploits and was probably known, you know, quite commonly in the streets and talked about for his exploits, and characterized

as a sort of swashbuckling rapist

that so many pirates were drawn as, because the stories were more interesting.

But behind him, what we really didn't know was a very political man.

Oh, you're speaking of Henry Avery.

I was speaking of Defoe.

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